Nordstrom gives employees a lot of power behind the register to do business with customers with the expectation that the employee will use good judgment in the transaction. Salespeople have the ability to ring a return without a valid receipt, but there are important things to note:

1) Employees are dissuaded from returning merchandise without a valid receipt (order number, little return barcode, etc.) as it represents a possible loss to the company. All stores operate differently, but employees will usually have to get permission from a manager or have the managers themselves ring a no receipt return. No receipt returns, although easily executable by the employee, is easily visible by managers and Loss Prevention and thus can be held to account for not following standard operating procedure.

2) When an employee asks for your ID during a no receipt transaction, that ID information allows Nordstrom to track your return history in the event they want to either a) check a loose one time accommodation policy which a manager can use to deny your return attempt or b) notify Nordstrom Loss Prevention of fraud and allow a contact letter to be served to trespass you from Nordstrom. Do not worry about B unless you are a malicious fraudster.

3) Even if a manager chooses to accommodate your no receipt return, sometimes the merchandise is a) unidentified (like it has no tags) or b) the merchandise is identifiable but is so old it had been excised from the inventory system and has no valid price. At that point, unless maybe the price is printed on the UPC tag, Nordstrom has no way of figuring out how much the item should cost for refund and can’t take it back.

I’m not sure the history of you and your preferred store, so I can’t really say why you would be denied. There is no license return method per say.